How I Became a Stranger

Dear Community,

I've never been great at sending postcards from my travels. And this newsletter, as much as I thought it would help me continue to feel connected to my community, has often been a reminder of the distance. This month marks two years since I boarded the Queen Mary with my husband and our two dogs. I remember the feeling—both excited and exhausted by the intense process of sorting, selling, and packing up two decades of life. I felt the absurdity and the dreamy thrill of putting the entire contents of one's life on a shipping container. 

With the New York City skyline fading in the distance, we captured this Old World ship sailing moment with a selfie, grinning between what was and what was not yet to be.

This is the story of how I became a stranger.

I thought I would have discovered more about my new life by now. I thought I would have written more by now. I thought I would have understood more about myself now. 

But I think I've also chosen to keep parts of this experience to myself. I've felt called inward, resistant to the performative.

I also felt too much to try to thoughtfully put it into words. I lost my poetry, some of my realness. 

I forgot the lessons I've come to know over the years: that the act of writing helps me find the words, that it's okay to be in the middle of the thing with no answers, with no clarity. It's safe to share the not-knowing, the not-quite-there-yet.

The truth is, what I thought would feel like refuge has frequently felt like rupture. What I imagined as adventure felt like anxiety. What I anticipated as a future filled with more peace, softness, and ease has often been clouded by worry and fear. A longing stuck, not quite nostalgic, not exactly wishful.

I've written before about grief. It's easy to understand a grief that overwhelms you when someone you deeply love dies. Or a grief you experience when you lose your home in a hurricane, or your country in war, genocide. Floods and earthquakes that wipe out communities, loved ones. The embodied grief of miscarriage. A collective grief we feel when a public figure—aka an angel, aka Dolly Parton—dies.

But what about an ambiguous grief when you've made choices that steer your life in a completely new direction? A grief that flickers on and off in your heart hundreds of times a day, a force unrelieved by four valves? A grief that doesn't make sense. That kind of grief is self-induced, perhaps unworthy of sympathy.

Maybe I’m just grieving myself.

This morning, my husband and I had a lengthy conversation about our current lives, our past selves, and our future choices. We frequently end up here, in the existential. We might begin discussing Spanish verb conjugations and somehow veer off course toward ideas that require less action and more pause.

Toward the end of this long inquiry into our individual and professional trajectories here in Spain, my husband said,

“I do know that I like it here.”

And I responded,

“Yes, but do you like how you feel here?”

Then to myself:

Do I like who I am here?

When I think about my life in New York, I love how I felt there. Not every moment, of course. But many of them. New York wasn't just a location to live; it was a city to belong to. It became a place that held up a mirror to who I could become.

I didn't belong because I lived or worked in a certain neighborhood. I belonged because my life continuously called me toward things that truly mattered to me. Dance and choreography. Pilates and healing. Meaningful relationships. Deep connections.

Now, Spain seems to be doing something different. It’s exposing my vulnerabilities, tiny cracks that reveal the lessons I haven’t quite learned. The parts of me that I felt most proud of haven't had the chance to show up here, yet. 

And yet, there are times when I don't recognize myself. It's not just that I'm living in a foreign country; it's that I am foreign to myself.

Who is this person who loved cruising through Manhattan but is now afraid to drive down a steep country road?

Who is this woman who can't advocate for herself in a medical appointment?

Who is this lover of language who lost the ease of her native tongue and now wanders in wordlessness? 

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The Gift of Beginner's Mind

Learning a new language provides ample opportunities for feeling like a beginner—a child, even—and this leaks into all aspects of life, from going to the grocery store (I accidentally bought three kilos of mussels just for me and Jimmy) to making medical appointments and trying to communicate the nuance of health-related issues.

After explaining to a doctor, just a couple of months after moving to Spain, that I was dealing with several issues, all likely related to my displacement, he informed me that now that I live in Spain I must learn Spanish, before walking out of the office. I was left feeling like I was to blame for my symptoms, like a child being scolded for not being able to learn fast enough.

And I can see his point. Maybe he was trying to help. Maybe all my problems would go away if I could understand what people were trying to say to me at the grocery store. Maybe this disorientation itself would be less consuming. 

But cultural differences and lack of empathy aside, sometimes it feels like I left behind the more grown-up, more successful, more confident version of myself when I crossed the waters. Over here I can't access the part of me that really knows something, even something as simple as understanding a stranger in the park asking me if my senior dog is a puppy. (After the third time, I now know the word for puppy is cachorro, and apparently the Spanish sun is giving Fern a glow-up.)

I've also been able to find some levity in living abroad and being unable to express myself. There have been plenty of moments to laugh at myself and with my husband. When we first moved to Spain and were out for a lovely dinner, my husband apparently asked the waiter to “sing it, please” when asking for the check. Just this week, he confidently told our neighbor, “Buen día” in the evening. I sometimes confuse the little Portuguese vocabulary I know with Spanish and end up calling my chest a piece of fish.

I've made so many laughable mistakes. Still, sometimes I forget how to have fun. I take it all too seriously. I worry I don't have the capacity to become fluent. I predict failure. 

And yet, I am learning. Not only a new language, but how to be the person I know I am when the conditions that helped me become her are no longer there.

Was New York really the training wheels? 

Maybe today, with this particularly vulnerable sharing, I'm learning that it's okay to say that I, too, am soft and struggling. That I thought I would know something by now. 

That admitting this is all harder than I imagined it would be is the only thing to do right now.

In gratitude,

Brynne